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Somatization occurs when you feel something physical as a result of an emotional or stressful feeling, but some doctors feel that the term is being used too much and not appropriately. In fact, many doctors believe that the term does not belong in medical terminology.

The authors of this article on the treatment of cervical myelopathy originally presented the results of a study comparing disc removal and replacement versus spinal fusion for this condition back in November 2008. Now, they offer a detailed look at the surgical technique and pitfalls of cervical disc arthroplasty (disc replacement in the neck), along with an update on this procedure.

There are different reasons to fuse the spine and different ways to do the fusion procedure. Surgeons are studying the results of fusion techniques to get an idea of which one works best for each problem. In this study, patients who had a spinal fusion for degenerative spondylolisthesis with one of three fusion methods are compared. Two of the fusion techniques used instrumentation such as screws or metal plates and screws.

Pain is a very difficult thing to measure. There's no lab test that can put it into an absolute number like a white blood cell count. Yet with 50 million chronic pain sufferers in the United States alone, there's got to be a better way to measure pain than the visual analog scale (VAS). Using this scale, patients assign a number from zero to 10 to rate their pain (zero is no pain, 10 is the worst pain).

Even simple spinal surgeries can result in serious problems when infection occurs. Despite sterile techniques, any open incision leaves the patient at increased risk of wound infection. The use of minimally invasive spinal surgery (MISS) may be changing the picture.